


Hooks for Bones

by ofiutt



Category: Avatar: The Last Airbender
Genre: Action & Romance, Alternate Universe - Historical, Fluff and Angst, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Mentioned Ozai (Avatar), Pirate AU, Stockholm Syndrome, pirate captain!Jet, the Freedom Fighters are his crew, they are young adults here
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-20
Updated: 2020-12-27
Packaged: 2021-03-09 01:21:30
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 8
Words: 14,617
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27116002
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ofiutt/pseuds/ofiutt
Summary: “We’re being ambushed!” Ursa screamed, and not much could be memorized by detail involving the commotion that followed her warning. Crewmates battled enmeshing pirates through the blur of Zuko’s mismatched eyes while he sprinted towards the sterncastle, dodging attempted incursions before kicking open the hatch to his objective and finally retrieving his broadswords.
Relationships: Jet/Zuko (Avatar)
Comments: 24
Kudos: 51





	1. Chapter 1

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Please click on the disclaimer obtainable under the chapter index before reading any further.

Zuko espied the horizon that pervaded the view from which he stood upon the gunnel of the ship, hands clasped over the railing as sore elbows reclined against it. The voyage seemed as if it had only been a day since his father’s precursor announced that he will be joining his mother on a dangerous trip overseas for a meeting with the dignitaries of Tonkin, just south of his nation.

Short, serrated hair bent slightly towards the direction of which the wind blew and suddenly he felt a palm being gently placed upon his raised shoulders. Zuko looked up to see his mother bestowing him a faint yet consoling smile that never seemed to fail in effacing his worries.

“I know it’s hard, but your dispatch is only lasting for about another week. The helmsman says that we’re only a few buoy floats away from Câm Phả.” Zuko emitted a sound between a tsk and a scoff, turning around so his upper back leaned against the railing with his arms crossed. “The only reason why I’m here is because you coaxed Father out of giving me a much steeper punishment. Not that the other one he gave me was any short of it.”

Ursa sighed, the edges of her mouth being hefted slightly into an obscure grin. “I suppose the Emperor’s wife has more influence over him than his ambassador.” She spread out her arms in front of the Prince. “Come here.”

Zuko leaned in until her right shoulder brushed the left side of his face, an urtication striking that of his marred cheek still in the process of healing. He winced and jerked back instantly. “Oh, sorry. I forgot it wasn’t completely remedied yet,” Ursa avowed, extending her hand out near the wound in alleviation as if to compensate for the brief harm of her contact. “It’s fine. Just stings is all,” Zuko grumbled.

He squeezed his eyes tightly with every blink he gave until his vision cleared, heeding an unfamiliar crewmate across deck not too far from them. He was abnormally large, a wood log hanging by a strap across his back and a helmet securing the circumference of his head. “Who’s that?” Zuko asked his mother pensively, who remained silent for a moment before her eyes widened in revelation. “Not a sailor,” she whispered before an arrow abruptly leaped from above and missed them by a few inches, pinning itself into a floorboard.

“We’re being ambushed!” Ursa screamed, and not much could be memorized by detail involving the commotion that followed her warning. Crewmates battled enmeshing pirates through the blur of Zuko’s mismatched eyes while he sprinted towards the sterncastle, dodging attempted incursions before kicking open the hatch to his objective and finally retrieving his broadswords.

He quickly sheathed the _dao_ into his scabbard and slung it over his back, darting through the door to briefly peer at the scenery bestowed to him. Various sailors across deck were avoiding and returning assaults by marauders with that of their own. The panorama nebulized his sight like trails of color whisked across a canvas by a paintbrush, and Zuko suddenly felt nauseated by their situation until he noticed his mother assailing a pirate from a crow’s nest of the ship and that seemed to mollify him a bit.

Zuko snapped himself back into corporeality and turned around to see if there were any more pirates occupying the back of the vessel, heeding one of them ensnaring the helmsman. The Prince wasted no time in jumping onto a rigging near him, hastily climbing the webbed ropes and landing near the rudder-post, displaying his broadswords with the sweep of his arms.

He managed to steer the pirate’s direction towards the edge of the sterncastle and shove him overboard without much effort in their grapple (all while the helmsman kept guiding the wheel anxiously) before another pirate inhabited the areaーfollowed by another. And _another_. Zuko believed for a moment that he was holding them off fine until the appendency of more assailants overwhelmed him to a perturbed degree.

Zuko scanned the crowd of marauders in front of them with challenging scrutiny until his mismatched eyes land upon the crow’s nest of the mizzenmast above them; a pirate that held a crossbow aligning the tip of an arrow to the direction of the Prince and the helmsman.

Zuko dropped his weapons and abruptly shoved the man behind him out of harm’s way with the perturbed push of both hands, a shooting arrow landing between the margin of two floorboards beside them. The maneuver caused the helmsman to accidentally swerve the wheel to the opposite direction of the ship's intended route, dangerously angling the vessel as almost everyone halfway slid off the tilting surface. Zuko managed to catch hold of the helm's pillar and arched his body forward to steer the ship back to its original state.

Once he stood back up and began to reach for his discarded _dao_ , an adventing force suddenly bumped Zuko against the railing near the wheel before he was whipped around and roughly pinned to it. A splinter halfway pierced the left side of his face as a result and he screeched in agony; the distrait, small turn of his neck imparting the Prince of the two hooks wrapped around his neck in opposite directions.

“I think you already noticed that we’re not exactly here for your _mother_ ,” a charismatic, almost sultry voice remarked into his ear. Zuko shuddered from the hot breath that appended every word that was spoken and he distantly thought that there wasn’t going to be much leeway for him to escape any time soon. “She doesn’t have as much power or possession over you like your daddy does.”

-

Ursa concluded her grapple by abutting the balanced ankle of her opponent with the sweep of her leg, eliciting the pirate to fall on her back with a thud. She loomed over her, ensuring her victory with a foot on the marauder’s chest and the tip of her sword pointed an inch away from the throat.

The pirate’s indignant scowl slowly morphed into a baleful expression, the corner of her mouth lifted into a smirk as her eyes rolled backwards to peer beyond the ship. Ursa furrowed her brows and perked her head up to the sight of pirates retreating back to their ship adjacent to the one they were intruding. Her gaze was short-lived, however, when she felt her frame get pushed to the side and she fell with a grunt, sword clanking upon the pavement beside her as she watched the marauder run back to her crew from the corner of her eye.

The pirate vessel soon left their ship completely; alone, abraded, and tattered as bewildered crewmates shared occasional glances in discomfiture and confusion. “Get back to work!” the Captain abruptly shouted, eliciting a startle amongst the sailors before adhering to his order.

He then walked over to Ursa, head hanging slightly with discernible solemnity and whispered something in her ear. The divulgence elicited her to suddenly brush past him, flouncing off to the direction of the sterncastle before slamming the door shut.

Ursa’s eyes remained closed for a very long time; her fingers intertwined near her face as elbows ached from their prolonged contact with the surface of her desk. She heard the faint click of the hatch opening before the sound returned with its latch as footsteps grew more audible until stopping. “Ambassador Ursa,” a chamberlain spoke, eliciting her to finally open her eyes. “Even with their hostage being worth riches, the chances of Zuko being trafficked are highly unlikely. And if that were to happen, whoever they might sell him to will only hold him for ransom against the Qing Dynasty and the cycle will occur all over again.”

The seated woman responded with nothing but a barely audible hum, evoking a bemused glance shared between her subordinates before a different speaker broached a possible concurrence involving her son. “We believe that instead, they might trade Emperor Ozai his son back in return for the delegitimization of their crimes.” 

Ursa remained silent for a moment until she abruptly stood up from her desk, adamancy visible on her face. “If that’s the case then it will take them about a week to reach Shaanxi. In the meantime we have the forum to worry about, so that will remain our first priority.” She dismissed everyone from the room with the sway of her hand and watched the door click shut.

Ursa stood still for a moment and scanned her desk before her eyes settled on that of a loose sheet, snatching it as the center of the paper crumpled within her palm. The maneuver made it difficult for her to break the sheet out of pent-up aggravation and despondency, giving up trying to rip it as a result and hurling it to the floor. Ursa slowly turned around to face the wall, one hand grazing the lacuna of where _dao_ swords used to reside until earlier today as tears leaked from reddened eyes, her other palm stifling her quiet sobs.

-

Zuko was tossed into a small room by the first pirate he cognized before the skirmish, a muffled grunt emitting his gagged mouth from the impact. He lacked mobility due to his pinioned limbs but he distraitly thought that he wouldn’t be needing it anyway in such a cramped sojourn.

The burly marauder stepped aside to give his confrère some leeway into the room, who approached Zuko with one step forward and from this angle, the Prince discerned that he was not much older than him. A hand rested on his hip while the other twiddled its fingers between the straw of wheat in his mouth, smirking. Various segments of brigandine and steel were fastened to his attire, presumably taken from vanquished Qing Dynasty soldiers.

“I’m Captain Jet. And I’m sure you’ve already met Pipsqueak,” he disclosed, tipping his head toward the other pirate in emphasis of the introduction. Zuko widened his eyes in revelation of who exactly the owner of the _shuang gou_ was earlier. “I’d get pretty used to things around here if I were you,” he remarked, the edge of his smirk basalling to an almost menacing lour. “...because you’re never escaping under my watch.”

Before Zuko knew it, the door had clicked shut, leaving him in solitude.


	2. Chapter 2

Time, the hostage soon learned, underwent a lot of strange mutations, in a storage room; especially in a storage room of which its inhabitant wasn’t able to free himself of the ropes using one of the tools that resided there, to Zuko’s vexation. If he were in a real cell, the fluctuations of sunlight would’ve been easier to track due to the open aperture splayed upon its stone wall, but his captors seemingly deemed him unworthy of suchーso much so that no food or water has been bestowed to him since the day of his detainment, when Zuko’s gag had been soaked of the tears that exuded his eyes until they drooped closed out of fatigue.

Really the only way one could mark time under his circumstances was if they listened to whatever was occurring upon the ship outside the thin width of the hatch. Whether it be footsteps, conversations, or the manumissions of various sails, anyone with common sense would presume that they ceased when nightfall had arrived. Other than that, there were no events, and the passage of the hours was nameless. Eventually Zuko stopped paying any attention, despite the probability of gaining any useful information from just pressing his ear to the door a few feet from him. What was the point?

Apparently, he didn’t need to find out on his own; a young man with red markings broadened across either cheek and an outfit similar to that of Jet’s had unlocked the hatch and walked towards him, untying the knots securing his wrists, ankles, and the tie that gagged him.

Too weak and disheartened to inquire him with anything, Zuko managed to stand up through the extrication of trembling legs after stretching them out. His posture was supported by that of the pirate and he distraitly thought that the latter was more approachable than his austere counterparts, albeit Zuko didn’t think of himself too naïve to believe that _these_ kinds of people offset useful qualities to accommodate others.

The pirate guided him towards the sterncastle across deck with a gentle palm against his back, the detainee blinking a few times to adjust to the overwhelming incandescence of the sunlight his sight had lacked for the past fewーdays? Hours? He didn’t know and it didn’t matter.

Once the pair had reached the door to Jet’s (presumable) headroom, Zuko’s guide clutched him by the forearm and balanced himself on the tips of his toes to murmur in his burned ear; a smile somehow audible through the feminine, high-pitch of his voice. “Could you pretend I hurt you on the way here? I’m his First Mate.”

Feminine? ...Oh. _Oh_. Before he could have any time to ask about the proposal or shoot the pirate a suspicious glare of her amiability, the hatch had opened and she practically hurled him into the teeming room. Zuko stumbled against the pavement of the floorboards (the amount of time he spent pinioned seemed to have robbed him of his usual grace) and settled onto the bergère chair near the table at the center of the headroom, which was smaller than that of his mother’s and more cluttered with various antiques and curios that were stolen, no doubt.

Familiar, syrupy articulation had impended the click of the door being shut and Zuko realized that this was his third time meeting their Captain face-to-face. “Thanks Smellerbee.” Jet’s back was facing Zuko, his loins reclining against the rim of his desk as he seemed to be examining something placed in his hands. The detainee’s behold gradually followed the length of Jet’s arms until they settled on the _dao_ knife being cradled by the latter, and Zuko felt his right eye widen in revelation and indignance of who that weapon truly _belonged to_.

“Where’s my other one? They’re two halves of a single weapon!” Jet turned to look at himーjust a glance thrown over his shoulder. “Relax. They’re under safekeeping.” He fully rotated his body around and gracefully slumped into his seat, reaching under his right end of the shambolic table to reveal a rambutan before hoisting an ankle over his lap.

Now that Zuko was granted a closer view of his incarcerator, he could discern that the straw of wheat was absent between chapped lips, and his unkempt hair was mapped with an umber hue instead of black. The sharp arch of his eyebrows made his piercing gaze all the more formidable. He was beguiling, handsome even, and the hostage felt ashamed to not know whether he was more drawn to Jet or the fruit he was peeling with his own broadsword.

Zuko absentmindedly grazed the indentation of his belly with a light palm. “So how much _qian_ do you think he’s gonna pay us to give you back?” He bestowed Jet with a confused look before the latter dropped the rambutan on his lap, gearing Zuko’s gaze with a thumb pointed behind him as he smirked. The target of direction was a portrait of his father, hanging on the wall as various daggers and arrows impaled the painted figure.

The hostage wanted to bark a laugh, but settled for an indignant snarl and a furrow of his brow instead. “Probably an island’s worth if you kept me as far away from Shaanxi as possible,” he replied, shrugging before twisting his face to the side.

Jet’s face looked rather confounded from the corner of Zuko’s left eye, maneuvers paused as the _dao_ blade and halfway carved fruit remained steady in riveted hands. The reaction appeared to be brief, however, when the Captain decided to initiate some sort of twisted catechism on Zuko’s part.

“Shaanxi? Is that where you’re from?” The detainee side-eyed him before inwardly concluding that he didn’t exactly have anything to lose at the moment, apart from the broadswords apparently being used as kitchen peelers but that was beside the point. “...Yes.”

“Good boy,” Jet pilloried, tossing the rambutan’s white interior at Zuko. His repressed thirst and malnourishment surged through the motion of his arms when he caught the supple flesh, and could barely remember chewing it before swallowing and gobbing the seed onto a palm. Jet watched him through scrutinizing eyes, rotating the tip of the _dao_ around on his desk by the hilt. “As the Emperor’s son, you must’ve been taught the ‘ins and outs’ of the province, right? Do you also know which regions to cross if that’s our destination out here?”

Zuko narrowed his right eye until its width was similar to that of its counterpart. “That depends. What’s your motive in my release?” The Captain halted the spin he evoked from Zuko’s broadsword and returned the frown in brief solemnity and pension before breaking into a chortle.

“Do you seriously _not_ know? Did your daddy not tell you about his cash-grabbing plots that made the lives of Qing peasants worse than they already were?” Jet was now standing before his wingback, palms affixed to the surface of his desk as he bestowed Zuko with an indignant moue. “Do you know why we’re the way we are? Taxation pushed almost a quarter of your citizens to live in slums and eventually out to sea in fear of getting put to death. Maybe we should’ve brought your mother to tag along so we could turn the tables like we did you.”

Zuko’s eyes grew wide with affrontation and leaned forward, hands clutching the rim of the armrests from his seat. “Leave my mother out of this! None of you would understand because you clearly don’t have any.”

Before he knew it the tip of his own _dao_ ’s blade was a centimeter away from piercing his Adam’s apple, with Jet being on the receiving end of the hilt as he knelt against the table, a few of its retrofits having dropped to the floor in the midst of the maneuver. A scowl occupied the Captain’s face, hickory eyes glowering into Zuko’s and the latter distraitly noted how well they suited him.

The pique across Jet’s countenance slowly morphed into that of amiability and Zuko furrowed his brow in discomfiture. “You’re an outcast now. Like _me_. And us outcasts have to stick together,” the former avered, the derision audible through his sultry voice. The bevel of the knife was now barely scraping Zuko’s left cheek, the hostage wincing whenever it brushed past his convalescent burn while Jet’s free hand cradled the other side of his face as if he were the rambutan being carved earlier.

“What’s your name?” the Captain asked, eyes fixated on the wound presented to him. Zuko’s body riveted completely. He was wrong when he considered his _dao_ to be the only thing left to lose. If he disclosed his real name he would no longer have any leverage in the probability of escaping. Zuko exhaled sharply and responded with an impuissant “L-Li.”

“Li,” Jet repeated under his breath, moving the blade back to its original state under Zuko’s jaw. “Li _what?"_ The hostage grimaced and averted his gaze to the floor, remaining still. “Li, Captain.”

All of a sudden the chair Zuko was sitting on had flipped to its side against the pavement of the floor with a blaring ‘thud,’ and it didn’t take long for the latter to realize that Jet had kicked it with the vault of both legs from which they resided. The detainee had fallen from his seat as a result and landed with a grunt, blinking his eyes open to the sight of Jet towering over him.

“Good,” he remarked, “now I could quit treating you like a guest.” Jet then emitted a sophisticated whistle between his lips that Zuko could only perceive as a signal for backup and haplessly found that he was right.

Pipsqueak had burst open the door and flounced over to where Zuko’s figure had splayed across the floor in affliction, draping his body over a broad shoulder and plonking him once they were out of the sterncastle. The crewmate then walked back inside and stayed there momentarily before vacating with a floor scrubber and a bucket in hand, plopping them beside Zuko who had managed to hoist his upper body off of the ground.

“Captain is having you wash up the deck,” he bellowed, though the hostage deemed it to be his natural voice. “Welcome aboard.”


	3. Chapter 3

“The lodestone suggests that we’re about halfway across the southern sea in the direction of Guangdong,” The Duke apprised, lowering his head a bit to descry Jet’s expression. The Captain was leaning over his cluttered desk, hands pinning the top corners of a somewhat rendered map. “Good. Li said that the coast of the Qing empire was just north of the Dongsha Islands, meaning that we’re getting closer if they come into view.”

The Duke quirked an eyebrow. “Does he know that the islands are a pirate haven?” Jet looked up from the map and shot the sentry an amused mien, his awry smile hefting upwards by one end. “You think someone like him was allowed to be informed of things like that? Just imagine the look on his face when the other fleets want to trade things worth more than us in exchange for him.”

The Duke snickered and Jet dismissed him with the undulation of his hand before the latter whipped out a _dao_ knife from underneath his desk and punctured a locale of the map with its tip.

-

Zuko discerned a cockroach crawling out the margin of two floorboards and abruptly crushed it with the bottom of the bucket, sloshing the water in the process. The vessel appeared to be absolutely befouled with pests and if Zuko didn’t feel humbled before, he might as well be begging for the crust of molded bread with this current task. Before he could dip the scrubber into the bucket someone had kicked it from his reach, and the hostage looked up to find that the person who did so was a particularly buff crewmate whose magenta fur coat contrasted the usual green and brown hues that discretized the ship. The pirate had already continued walking once he had punted the bucket, snickering.

“What’s your _problem?"_ Zuko contended, not too unlike a shout as he reached out for the scuttle and clutched it. The pirate paused his stroll and glanced at him over the shoulder. “I got none,” he replied nonchalantly, the facet of a smirk barely visible from their distance. The pirate proceeded to walk away, but he wasn’t finished being spiteful. “Keep scrubbing, Sangui-kisser.” 

Zuko’s body riveted in place from the comment; Wu Sangui was nationally known for helping establish the Qing Dynasty through the brutal vanquish of its predecessors and the decimation of their forces, essentially boosting his father’s career. Zuko shut his eyes and furrowed his brow, head lowered in what the crewmate probably discerned as shame. He was done reciprocating leniency to everyone’s disrespect on this wretched ship.

The detainee flinged the scrubber at the back of the pirate’s head with striking accuracy and the latter instinctively hunched his shoulders from the impact, twisting his whole body to face Zuko. Pirates working the shrouds near the pair averted their gazes at them with intrigue.

The crewmate began to lunge himself at Zuko who had stood up from the floor, a furious countenance shared between the two of them as the pirate excreted a strike for Zuko’s head. The hostage saw it coming and ducked in time, rising from under with his elbow and planting a fist upon the underside of his chin, whose head snapped back exigently as a result. Many crewmates were now surrounding the brawl, emitting a few elated hollars when Zuko’s opponent regained his posture in time to sweep a leg towards his ankles, knocking him to the floor.

From where he lay half-caught on his side, the hostage slung the heel of his foot and hit the pirate square in the knee. The latter staggered backwards from the blow and grasped Zuko in the midst of his fall, using his lithe frame as a cushion.

The detainee grunted from the collision, attempting to push the massive weight off of him until the pirate abruptly grasped Zuko’s throat with the clutch of irate handsーnot tight enough for asphyxiation, but definitely loutish enough to prevent speaking.

All of a sudden, the familiar voice of a young woman had riveted practically everyone of their maneuvers. “Sneers! Get off of the cash loot!” Zuko’s assaulter (or, well, _Sneers_ ) still had his palms abutting the former's neck to the floorboard underneath him, and Zuko kept trying to pry the stubby fingers off with his own. Sneers gawped indignantly at Smellerbee. “But-”

“ _Now!_ ” The larger crewmate growled and detached himself from Zuko, flouncing off as the latter instantly wheezed for air. Various pirates remained scattered in the area tenanting the recent brawl until Smellerbee bestowed them with a scowl, yelling a reproachful “Get back to work!”

Zuko stroked the bruise implemented on his throat with gentle fingers as he slowly arose from the floor, peering at the First Mate. “You all right?” she asked, almost apologetically. Her concern was perceptible across her features and Zuko distraitly noted that he didn’t receive the same display of regard from her other crewmates. He gave her a nearly indiscernible nod and inwardly basked in the grin he got in response. She should do that more often.

Hours had passed after the brawl and the sedulous patination of the ship had Zuko sough in appreciation for the arrival of dusk. Unfortunately, the detainee’s racing mind had robbed him of any sleep once he and the Freedom Fighters -that was what they apparently called themselves- had mounted their hammocks when walking into the fo’c’sle, with Zuko keeping his distance of course. The amount of vitriolic looks and the sheer awkwardness of it all nearly made him miss the first few nights he spent here after his capture.

Multiple effigies of how his mother might’ve reacted to their separation continued to torment him and had surprisingly offset all the other possible consequences involving him and his father in the future. Zuko couldn’t seem to stop twisting and turning on the hammock and briefly wondered that perhaps some physical exercise might tire him out enough for a decent night’s rest. The only problem was, certain pirates were roaming the deck outside for their night shift. An obscure grin suddenly made its way across the lower half of Zuko’s face. Such a predicament might hinder plans for normal combatants, but not for someone who trained under Ambassador Ursa herself.

He tiptoed his way across the lodging with wide strides before exiting the doorless aperture, hiding behind various barrels and walls from foreseen glances of the vedettes as he moved. Zuko noticed the sterncastle across from him and briefly thought about breaking in and retrieving his _dao_ before shaking the notion away. Jet’s revelation would be inevitable, and he was wise enough to think twice before testing his authority.

Zuko descried the entry to the ship’s bilge and somersaulted his way between two quarters when a crewmate glanced at his direction. He instantly hopped into the underpass, walking down narrow tunnels while determining where to practice his combative skills; he definitely needed it from the internal disappointment he faced earlier today.

The hostage espied a downcast noticeably smaller than the others and scampered over to it, peering through the aperture to possibly foresee the area it led to. When Zuko realized he couldn’t, he hunched down his upper body and walked through, his chest swelling from claustrophobia the compressed tunnel seemed to evoke him of.

His body was completely robbed of its mobility when he stepped inside. The expanse was practically floored with deceased individuals and various patches of clothing that resided within their bones. Zuko deemed the tattered garbs to be uniforms but it was hard to discern it entirely. 

He couldn’t seem to refrain from gaping at the sight presented to him; he knew that pirates were notorious for murdering the recipients of their theft, obviously, but such a disclosure really put things into perspective for Zuko in terms of who _exactly_ was sharing their room with him at nightfall.

If the abundance of past lives occupying the floorboards weren’t enough, Zuko's shock definitely enhanced when he averted his gaze to the upper half of a skeleton hung upon the wooden wall aside from the others. The detritus was partially hung by a sword punctured in between the ribcage, decaying flesh still visible along various bones as well as the frayed uniform. He slowly walked closer to the decaying body and heeded the particular fold of the _guanmao_ remaining over its skull.

Zuko staggered back, tripping over a fragment of what he presumed to be another skeleton and fell, gasping before he slapped a palm over his mouth in shock. Admiral Zhao had always criticized the headwear of various dignitaries behind their backs since Zuko had been very little. The vessel of the Freedom Fighters was a stolen ship from _his fleet_.

Ever since Zhao had been promoted to a higher appellation no one has ever mentioned his name in the palace, nor has Zuko seen him again. That is… until _now_.

After a moment of silent reminiscence, Zuko stood up, walked over and traced nimble fingers along the hem of what he perceived to be Zhao’s black _magua_ before tearing off a piece of it, wrapping the cloth around his forehead. He sighed softly and then bowed.


	4. Chapter 4

Zuko gathered the usual cleaning equipage he had chosen every morning on the ship since Jet had conversed with him face-to-face, doing his best to ignore the tiny grumble his stomach had emanated. He had practically been skipping all meals during his time on this wretched vessel, with the exception of snatching himself a fruit after a drink of water (to save himself the embarrassment of interacting with other crewmates); despite Smellerbee’s occasional pressure on the hostage to eat more than that.

The hostage sighed, the paraphernalia in his arms nearly dropping to the floor when he turned around to espy Sneers leaning against the frame of the doorway. The pirate’s arms were crossed and his eyes were affixed to the side of the storage room instead of its center, where Zuko stood. The bridge of his nose was striated with a crimson mark that ended crookedly from cheek-to-cheek, definitely implemented by a thin blade of some sort. Sneers certainly didn’t have it yesterday so the scar must be in the early stages of amelioration.

“Captain wants you to clean the headroom,” he mumbled, his face remaining twisted to the side. Zuko cognized his hair to be more tousled than usual... then it clicked. The detainee furrowed his brow and lowered his head in cogitation; had Smellerbee told Jet of his altercation with Sneers? Or had someone else informed him of it? Jet had never assigned Zuko to clean the interior of the sterncastle before, so he was likely going to get punished next.

Zuko bestowed Sneers with a nod and the pirate started to leave, the hostage reluctantly following suit. He half-expected to be cut by the swipe of a hook’s barb once he had walked in the headroom but was instead greeted by the surprising clutch of a hand upon his chin, lifting his head up as Jet peered its underside.

The bruise was no longer evinced by purple and any remaining color splayed upon his neck was in the midst of disappearing, yet it still rather hurt Zuko when he spoke, despite the pain not being perceptible through his voice.

Jet appeared to be furious, but that wasn’t too far from anything unusual and fortunately for the hostage, the rage wasn’t directed towards him. The Captain released Zuko’s face with a contemplative “Hnng…” before snapping his fingers and pointing to the abundance of antiquity occupying the right side floor behind them. “Blue vase,” he avered, “polish it.” Zuko deferentially walked towards the subject at hand and started to ruminate that he was sent to the sterncastle for another reason.

“The fillet’s new,” Jet remarked, evoking the detainee to turn around in the direction of his tantalizing voice. Before he could do so, however, the Captain admonished him before Zuko could fully avert his gaze. “Keep your eyes on the vase!” he snapped, his censuring tone immediately shifting to an equable one when he spoke again. “ _Now_ answer me.”

Zuko inhaled sharply. “It’s to keep hair out of my face, Captain.” His response was... _partially_ the truth; the hostage had come to notice lately that his scar no longer evoked any feeling from him due to physical contact, which he had realized once the piece of cloth had touched the lesion when Zuko wrapped it around his forehead.

On another note, the growth of his hair _was_ starting to get visible, at least enough to straggle over the top of his forehead and brush past his ears (much to his irritation). Zuko wished it would just hurry up and get long enough so he could bind it back, yet the thought provoked a familiar half-pang to burn from the back of his florid mind: _Will I still be here when it grows out all the way? Will it ever be in a topknot again?_

Zuko shoved the postulations aside so they won’t distract him from his current task at hand; which was all the more difficult now that Jet’s eyes transfixed Zuko like slow weapons, an impaling torture without end. The tiny, insulting, expectant smirk prominent through the half-curve of Jet's mouth even though the detainee couldn’t even see it at the moment. All he could do was obey decrees as a heated nuance flushed the unmarred side of his face.

“Yeah, well you better get used to it,” the Captain propounded, a hint of commination growing more discernible by each word he spoke. “Our little… _visit_ to your father is getting postponed ‘cause of our next stop today.”

Zuko abruptly halted his maneuvers subjected onto the vase. “...Which is where?” he asked clemently, knowing that Jet’s lopsided grin had spread to a beaming simper despite his vantage point being directed to anything but. The Captain barked a regaled laugh. “Don’t worry about it. You won’t even need your _dao_.”

-

“Welcome to the Dongsha Islands! Well… one of them. It’s a place where adherents to our Code of Conduct gather freely,” The Duke expounded, at least that was what Zuko heard the others call him. The Freedom Fighters made their way to one of the larger streets and Zuko felt his head get pushed down by the jostle of a hand. “Hide your face,” someone had scolded from behind him, emphasizing his mnemonic with a tug at his hood. “We don’t want you sold just yet.”

As the crew stirred the flow of traffic, Jet seemed to have grown in stature from the corner of Zuko’s eyes, expanding his presence. He normally retained a certain amount of elegance to his movements, but now he stepped through the crowd with exaggerated purpose and delicacy. Jet gazed at the overture surrounding his crew through half-lidded eyes as the straw of wheat altered from one corner of his mouth to the next when he walked. He was an epitome of power and sophistication, a Captain shifting through graceful maneuvers with his _shuang gou_. Interjecting his percolation would betoke getting hanged by the roof of the mouth like a suffocated trawl.

The group strolled towards the bazaar at the center of town as other outlaws swaggered along the avenues, chests thrust out, elbows wide. Zuko agogged the unorthodox choices of munition from the marauders surrounding them, such as three-section staves, gargantuan crossbows, and matchlock firearms. He also espied a few pirates wielding some artillery that should have been flat-out impossible to fight with; one man carried a hand cannon that Zuko hadn’t seen since he’d been to Heilongjiang when he was a child.

The Freedom Fighters had by far the least amount of metal arming their sectaries, which… was impressive, admittedly. The crew had managed to infiltrate two Qing naval ships (as far as Zuko knew) despite apparently not being as physically strong or very equipped as the other pirates.

When they stepped into the Dongsha bazaar, Zuko cognized that it was not much different from the one in Kaifeng, the capital of Henan which neighbored his home province. Vendors sat cross-legged next to piles of foreign wares and victuals on tarps laid over the ground, scowling at passersby who kicked up too much dust or lingered without buying. The sounds of haggling rang out in the air and Zuko distraitly perceived that there was a sharp distinction between the warriors and the black marketeers who supplied them.

The hostage abruptly fell onto his knees against the dirt ground with a grunt, arching his neck upwards to the sight of an unfamiliar pirate that had turned around to discern who bumped into him. The stranger bestowed him with an affronted countenance before it softened into one of confusion and finally revelation.

“...I know you.” The taciturnity that followed the pair’s encounter seemed to have turned a few heads from the bustling punters before Jet walked over to his First Mate, grabbing her by the upper arm as he whispered something in her ear. He then detached himself from her and enacted a particularly complex gesture with one hand towards the rest of his crew, who had immediately begun to walk away in disparate routes from the market’s intersection.

Zuko felt himself get pulled to the side once he had stood back up and swathed his head, turning to face Smellerbee who had informed him that they were going to buy some dunnage for the ship. He then looked behind him to see Jet guiding the stranger by a hand to his back as many other intrigued corsairs followed suit, but Zuko’s outlook was short-lived due to his friend dragging him towards her by the clutch of an arm to initiate their errand.

He and Smellerbee had ended up walking from consortium to consortium until they reached one particular vendor who began to argue with the First Mate about their expenditure of his modules. Suddenly, their quarrel had halted and the three of them turned around to the resonance of an indignant yell.

“He’d be better off with those who know how much his father had hurt them!” Zuko couldn’t discern any Freedom Fighters that occupied the herd of corsairs surrounding Jet, who had his hooks outspread in deterrence of any incoming assailment, his brows furrowed with pertinacity and a serious frown that matched.

Zuko’s right widened when he discerned the bottom half of a roscoe peeping out of a pirate’s attire with the clutch of his hand, a few feet behind Jet. Zuko dropped every item he and Smellerbee had purchased from their detour and suddenly bolted into a sprint, dashing towards the commotion and grasped a rather extensive sword from another pirate’s scabbard in the midst of panic without looking away from his target. When he got close enough to the assailant he knocked the firearm away with the swift heave of the blade’s tip and ostentated the sword with both hands in front of him and Jet, sauntering to the side near the latter to ward off any marauders.

A pirate to the side of Zuko suddenly hurled a clenched fist towards him and the hostage saw it coming, adroitly ducking under the strike before knocking him out with the hilt of the sword. The maneuver elicited the attacker to bump into another pirate, visibly indignant at him from the contact and pushed him off to the direction of a third corsair. Zuko then felt a hand clutch on his wrist as multiple pirates began to participate in a crowded brawl, Jet guiding him towards the path of which they came before Zuko dropped his borrowed weapon in the process.

Jet emitted a familiar, intricate whistle and one after another, Freedom Fighters began to join their abscondment until the entire crew seemed to be leaping and scarping the ambience in unison. When they reached their vessel, Longshot had discharged an arrow from his crossbow with a rope affixed to it, and one by one almost every member of the crew had bestrided themselves onto the ship after the archer had swiftly tied the rope to a mooring.

The crew’s money seemed to not have been a waste after all, because Smellerbee had been dispatching a moiety of repair equipment to every pirate that had mounted themselves onto the vessel before her, including Zuko.

Once the First Mate had ascended the ship, Jet had announced their departure from the island and soon enough the manumissions of sails were initiated. Zuko looked down to peer at what Smellerbee had given him on the way to deck and kneeled down to open the package. The fardel consisted of hairy rambutans, and the Freedom Fighter took one from the bundle before enshrouding it. The fruit was a little overripe, but quite sweet.


	5. Chapter 5

During his days of expulsion, Zuko had woken nearly every single morning believing, at first, that he was still back in the Palace. Before his eyes had opened -still half-asleep- he had imagined that he could feel the luminosity of sunlight beaming itself into his skin from the windows, hear the resonance of voices in the hallway and birdsong outside, that he would find himself back in his own bed, and everything that had happened was just a dream.

Of course, however, he had then opened his eyes to metal overhead, cold and gray as ever. The sounds had been machinery and the distant reverberation of the sea, the bed revealed to be pallet on the bare floor, and the voices only those of sailors and his mother adjuring to her subordinates on deck. Such promulgations happened every time, but somehow, he’d never quite shaken away that half-belief: that this time, _this_ time, all the other occurrences would be revealed to have been nothing but last fragments of a nightmare, ready to fade away into nullity the second he woke.

Zuko woke now in darkness, disoriented and probably still dreaming, with the tense state of being wrapped up in metonyms that were only just beginning to fade. He was puzzled, yet blearily grateful, to hear the faint snoring of his crewmates amongst the deluge of hammocks that occupied the fo’c’sle in replacement of apathetic sailors. He had been cold all the time thus far, but perhaps the current intimacy of people he had grown accustomed to under the dire circumstances had induced a sense of immunity to the temperature.

Zuko arched his neck up and scanned the cicumjacent sectors of the room; it must be around midnight, judging by the disposition he and the others were currently in. Another imminently capricious day would arrive in more than a few hours. He almost wished Jet had just accepted one of the many offers he was given yesterday and dumped him off to a posse that would sell his limbs for individual, hefty prices. At least the contingency would’ve made things _so much_ simpler, as well as giving him something to mark time by (or toward). Yet he knew that ultimately, he couldn’t find it in himself to be indifferent to such a matter involving Jet, or any of the other pirates involved in his capture. As odd and devastating as it was, he _liked_ certain aspects of his current predicament... as well as those who had caused it.

The pirate sighed and slumped his head back onto the plaited ropes of the hammock, closing his eyes and drifting off to sleep once more.

-

Zuko tugged at the addended lengths of garb hanging from the knot secured at the back of his head and sighed, unlatching the door to the storage room. All of a sudden the undulated rim of what Zuko deduced to be a weapon had caught his waist, forcefully hauling him to the opposite direction of which he was facing.

When he espied the first few seconds of a glimpse tenanting Jet’s face, a series of cogitations had invaded his mind at once, imminently combining into a single, viable admissionーdid Jet change his mind?

Zuko barely had a moment to accept the inexorable future before the Captain had swung at him with the other half of his _shuang gou_ , eliciting the former to block his assailment with the side of his forearm.

No sudden maneuver had followed; both pirates remained in the same contingent position for an instant while the edge of Jet’s mouth slowly perked up into a smirkーit had been doing that for most of Zuko’s time spent here, really; like a wobbling compass needle abruptly jolting towards north. “You’re a decent grappler,” Jet opined, his tone kindred to that of an avowed conspicuousness. “Come with me.”

The Captain swiftly inserted the hooks back underneath his girdle and turned to guide Zuko out on deck. The latter simply blinked, nonplussed and dumbfounded, before sedately lowering his fists and exiting the doorway with perceptible chariness.

“Where are we going?” he asked. Jet’s half-smile grew into a more tangible, awry grin. “Somewhere with more open space,” he replied, briefly peeping at Zuko. “Every great swordsman should be able to fight well with a weapon they had yet to wield. You did fine with whatever you could grab yesterday, but the cutlass you chose was a disgrace.” 

The pair stopped at the wide expanse of the foredeck, having walked by Pipsqueak and The Duke working the gunports along the vessel’s posterior tract. Jet unleashed the _shuang gou_ from his sash and bestowed the hilts of both halves out to the crewmate, holding them by the curvature of their steel ends with a jubilant expression. “Try them.”

Zuko side-eyed him. “Just like that?” His Captain nodded. “Let me see how you hold them.” The crewmate lifted the hooks near his chest, like he would have with his own pair of broadswords. Jet perused his stance under furrowed brows, his hand brusquely resting on a hip from a bent arm. “Too high. They’re more flexible than what you’re used to,” he expounded, grabbing Zuko’s wrists and lowering them into an improved guarding position. “Most of the tactics you’re able to do with them will be down here, closer to your sides.”

With Jet’s arms over his, and being watched from the obscured yet wiling face nearly tucked into his shoulder from behind, the crewmate realized that they were suddenly very closeーthe front of Jet’s body warm and peremptory against his back, his hot breath faintly stirring his hair. Zuko’s mouth felt quite dry all of a sudden, and he swallowed minutely. “Uh... y-yeah. They’re a lot lighter, too. I should get accustomed to that.” Jet nodded, brushing his chin against the neophyte’s shoulder when he did so.

“Carry your weight further forward. A little lower.” Zuko’s breath hitched; the Captain had pressed one hand upon his chest while the other grasped his shoulder, guiding his upper body towards the front of them in a more slanted position.

“Relax,” Jet enjoined, nearly a whisper. The instruction evoked a shudder to cudgel itself down Zuko’s frame, and he could’ve sworn that his Captain felt the slight tremble beneath his palms as a result. Before Zuko could budge in place uncomfortably, Jet stepped away from him. 

“Now try swinging with them.” The crewmate sucked in the inside of his cheek and exhaled sharply, adjusting his weight before Jet could rectify him and turned to the side in a partial spin; swiping the blades out in front of him after deplaning in a lunge. “Good. You keep them aligned well.” Jet approached him and began to reach -hesitated so discernibly that Zuko had noticed it from his left eye- until backtracking and simply grasping the crewmate’s wrists again, tilting them near the middle. “Crossing them will definitely help when blocking something big coming in your direction. They don’t need to be consistently balanced like your _dao_ , but it works best in your advantage when you extend one to the front and the other in the back.”

Zuko nodded, eyes transfixed to the hooks and his breath discernibly quick. “Got it.” Jet bestowed him with an amused mien. “Go on and attack me.” The crewmate stared at him for a moment, visibly befuddled. “You know I’ll be fine.”

He tried not to sigh and took a step back before abruptly swinging the right half of Jet’s _shuang gou_ at his side, to which the latter deftly eluded with a somersault. Jet managed to catch his own right hook between the parallel of both feet from the floor and clutched it with his hand once he had risen to his feet.

Zuko attempted to assail him with the remaining half of the weapon until the Captain caught it with the curved edge of its counterpart, tugging the left hook towards him and bringing Zuko along with it as a result.

Jet staggered backwards, the appended weight of his neophyte eliciting both of them to fall to the pavement of the floorboards with an audible ‘thud.’ Zuko instantly panicked, hoisting himself up by the forearms at either side of Jet’s head and tried to clumsily detach himself from the Captain until the latter abruptly fisted a hand into his tunic, hindering their separation.

Jet’s solemn countenance was soon betrayed by his infamous, lopsided grin as it spread from the lower half of his face. He pulled Zuko in closer by the tug of his sark until his mouth was adjacent to his burnt ear. “Get to work,” he whispered, eliciting a wince from Zuko’s expression when his breath tickled his aural features.

“...What?” All of a sudden, the crewmate stumbled backwards and fell onto the floorboards, grunting from the impact his abdomen had made with the vault of Jet’s feet when he kicked upwards. Zuko blinked repeatedly in adjustment to the sunlight that halfway obscured his vision, the incandescence soon being replaced by the sight of Jet looming over him (it almost occurred to Zuko that such an overture was a habit of his at this point, relishing in the way his adversary’s son tacitly submitted to him like this).

“Not bad for a beginner,” he propounded, cadence not too dissimilar to sarcasm. “Let’s just hope you’re as quick to clean up on deck as you are at flopping.” Jet tucked his hooks beneath his girdle with the graceful undulation of his hands before turning to walk away, a hand lifted in farewell over his shoulder. “See you tomorrow, Li.”


	6. Chapter 6

Highfleet accidentally stepped onto the plate of fried bee pupae and abruptly slipped, evoking a resonance of beguiled laughter from the pirates surrounding her. “I was about to eat one,” The Duke bleated softly, watching as the tiny macaque flicked away pupas from in between her toes. “It better be worth more than how much you spent it on,” Smellerbee grumbled, “I’ve seen you do nothing productive with the little broad ever since we left the haven.”

“Oh _relax_ , Bee,” the Captain halfway slurred, slumping his arm around her shoulders before taking a short quaff from the chalice in his other hand, engraved with complex inscriptions Zuko couldn’t quite decipher near the other end of the dining table. “Money well earned is money well spent, right? We haven’t seen Longshot this happy since we stole that snub-nosed monkey from the prefect back in Gansu!” Longshot looked at him. “Loris. Sorry.”

“Teach it new tricks,” Sneers proposed, targeting Highfleet with the spiral motion of his chopsticks as he continued to speak with a full mouth. “Useful ones. Like how to block attacks and what not.”

The Duke clapped his hands together and barked a laugh. “You’re right! Hey Cap’n, you should bring out your _shuang gou_ and test it out on the runt.” Various hollers of agreement emitted that of diverted crewmates before Jet propitiated them with the raise of his hands and a light chuckle.

“All right, all right. Don’t get too drunk before the real fun happens.” He pushed back his chair and stretched, ambling in the direction of the sterncastle behind them. Another round of amused laudation filled the sea air and alerted Highfleet with its precipitation, eliciting her gaze to turn from left to right until she scurried anent Zuko’s corner of the broad table. The macaque extended a hand towards his bowl of _saang mein_ , and the pirate was about raise his dish and knee the underside of the wooden pavement to startle her before she aligned her outstretched arm with the other in a sprawl, reclining on her hind legs to rest near him.

Smellerbee tittered, propping up her forearm to settle her chin on a palm in disport. “I think it likes you, Li.” Sneers scoffed. “Of course it’ll like the guy that’s gonna clean up its dung.” Zuko bestowed him with a miffed snarl. “Oh I don’t know, I think your mouth might be too hard to wash.”

An enlivened tumult followed his retort and the Freedom Fighter couldn’t refrain from the smile that hefted his lips as he slurped up a few lukewarm noodles. After a moment of occasional petting from Zuko, Highfleet decided that she had overstayed her welcome and upraised herself; scampering across various comestibles -some familiar, some exotic- until she abruptly leaped onto The Duke’s shoulder and snatched his helmet, practically darting into a sprint from under the dining table before granting him the chance to react.

“Go on,” Longshot incited, prompting everyone to avert their gazes in the direction of such an outlandish use of his voice. Zuko had to glance behind himself twice before fully comprehending that the other pirate was talking to him. Longshot assured his crewmate with a nod. “She likes you best.”

Zuko found the macaque atop one of the barrels adjacent to the sterncastle, apparently enthralled by the pickelhaube of his crewmate’s headgear. Highfleet allowed herself to be lifted into the embosom of cautious arms, emitting a high-pitched babel when she placed the helmet over her head a little too remissibly.

“Shh, shhh,” Zuko hushed in gentle mollification, “we gotta get this back to my crewmate, and then we’ll get your dad Longshot to teach you everything he knows about sailing and hunting and fighting, because you sure don’t want to learn it from me.”

He didn’t exactly know what he was doing, but the coos seemed to be working fine since the animal no longer emanated noises of any sort, and had now mounted his shoulder to play with the loose strands of his tresses. “Yeah, we‘ll get him to teach you how to be a good thief, too,” Zuko expounded, absentmindedly lifting a finger above his head so Highfleet could fist it, distantly reminding him of a human baby.

“A real piece of work, huh? You even got a head start, look at you.” The Duke’s helmet slipped off of her head when she tipped it but Zuko managed to catch it before it hit the floor, and began to walk both of them in the direction of light and hearty palavers out deck. “Let’s just hope he won’t punish you the way my dad did me, ‘cause you’re just too pretty for a scar like mine!” From the corner of his right eye, the pirate thought he saw a silhouette flitting from the other side of Jet’s headroom, but when he turned to look, there was nothing but darkness.

-

The Freedom Fighters had all their possessions garnered and packed by now with the passable exception of Zukoーdespite having fortuitously been given his broadswords by Jet, the corsair was only reminded of his initial subjugation and conveyable belongings probably still residing in his mother’s ship, and that notion would have only broached a series of crestfallen thoughts that he had worked so hard to repress long ago. All he could do was remain stagnant when he and his crewmates were announced of their arrival at Guangdong earlier today.

Zuko instinctively grimaced from under the dark hood of his mantle; seaports weren’t exactly acclaimed for the piscine stench that pervaded their climates, and the coast of Guangdong was no different. Once they had moored the vessel amongst various merchant ships at the jetty, the crew walked over to where the harbormaster resided, who addressed them with an irascible “Where to?” without looking up from his paperwork on the desk.

The inquiry somehow managed to get the infamous smirk off Jet’s face, though, replacing his countenance with a nearly affronted mien Zuko had seen before yet couldn’t quite discern. “Shaanxi,” Jet repliedーalmost snapped. The harbormaster sighed exasperatingly. “Great. More truckling serfs,” he muttered, perhaps distantly. “You planning on dodging the bullet with His Grace’s famine, too?” Zuko was unaware of his clenched fists until they hurt, leaving little red crescents upon the blunt of his palms. “What are you selling?”

“Something you can’t afford,” Jet’s offbeat response finally evoked the _Hong Yao_ to perk his head up in discomfiture and espied the band of misfits with a scrutinizing squint, his eyes widening in revelation when they landed on Zuko. “Wha... you’re on every placard in Guangzhou!”

“Li,” the Captain pronounced calmly, scratching the back his fingernail with that of his thumb before glancing back to the harbormaster and faintly smirking. 

Suddenly, Zuko leaped onto the surface of the desk and urbanely trapped his neck with both halves of the _dao_ , eliciting the harbormaster to stand up from his chair as various sheets of paper drifted onto the floor. “We’re gonna take the land route up until His Highness here gets reunited with daddy,” Jet explained, taking a few steps forward. “In the meantime, you could allow our ship to stay here just until we get back and we’ll even pay you extra to keep your mouth shut.”

Pipsqueak emphasized his proposal by plonking a massive sack of _qian_ onto the bureau, relishing the expanded width of their victim’s eyes for the second time. “Or...” Jet retained, the hefted corner of his smirk slipping into a rather threatening lour, “I could just have our confidante kill you and we keep the money.” He turned to glance at his crew. “Wouldn’t that be more lucrative for us?” Scattered murmurs emitted pernicious Freedom Fighters in agreement, including a perfunctory chatter from Highfleet.

“W-wait,” the harbormaster uttered, extending a hand yet trying to refrain from making contact with his possible murderer. “My lips are sealed.” Jet glared at him under furrowed brows in a moment’s enmity until he split the tension with a shrug and began to walk away. Zuko released the man in front of him with the sheathe of his blades after the Captain lifted a hand over his shoulder in attestation, leaving the harbormaster to slump over his desk as he tugged the hem of his cowl and scuttled after his crewmates.

Arriving at Guangzhou’s ambit took somewhat longer than expected. The multitudinous amount of people addressing the capital as either Kwangtung or Canton made Zuko nearly want to induce a fistfight out of the next resident that did so; only to be conciliated by Smellerbee when his irritation was discerned, to his distant gratitude.

Now that they were here, the crew simultaneously realized that Guangzhou was at least not too difficult to blend inーmore acculturate than the Dongsha Islands, sure, but the amount of ethnic crowds occupying the various boroughs of Guangdong’s biggest city had Zuko feeling somewhat nauseous in contrast to the merits of seclusion he was granted early on in his life. Jet’s surrogate came to his rescue once more and managed to convince the Captain to make a rest stop (judging by the aggravation prominent on his features as well as that of the other pirates, he was likely going to do so anyway).

“Two cups of Jasmine please,” Zuko propounded, his indignance betrayed by the lifted edge of his mouth when Smellerbee reticently teased him. The waitress nodded and left their table giggling and looping the end of one of her braids like a schoolgirl, and Zuko was distantly relieved that she wasn’t nearly as intimidated as the other locals in the tea shop; the owner seemed too scared to inform Longshot of their ‘no pets allowed’ policy and two of the patrons had taciturnly given up their seats for Jet and Pipsqueak when approached. He supposed the bistro already had its fair share of outlaws browbeating the placeーno one had even turned their heads to steal a glimpse of Zuko’s face under his flabby cloak.

All of a sudden, the door to the tea shop banged open and everyone simultaneously averted their gazes to that of the interloper. “That’s them from the poster! They’re the ones holding him for ransom!”

An abundance of _jîng chá_ appeared to have surrounded all ramparts from the outside of the building, perceptible from the open apertures splayed on two walls across from each other. A handful of constables were standing behind the man that had blocked the doorway; it was the _Hong Yao_.

Zuko almost instantly looked behind himself to heed Jet’s expression, perhaps done to await an order, before the waitress had abruptly released the tray in her hands and sent two tea cups shattering from the impact upon the floor. Her sudden maneuver seemed to have provoked every source of untenable event that had followed the crew for the rest of the eveningーLongshot promptly unleashed an arrow that punctured the harbormaster’s bare throat with such felicitous precision that Zuko flinched from the overture, nearly covering his ears when Highfleet (or the waitress?) emitted a blood-curdling screech as the _Hong Yao’s_ limp frame slumped onto the floor.

Sneers tackled the underside of a nearby table and shouldered it to the _jîng chá_ who were attempting to rush in through the open hatch all at once, eventually undertaking the appending weight of more constables until they stumbled far enough from the entry. Pipsqueak assisted his crewmate by slamming the door shut with a blaring ‘thwack’ after kicking the body off to the side as if it was an irksome pebble.

Various screams of consternation and startlement from appalled locals emphasized the sudden change of ambience in the room as Smellerbee and The Duke battled incoming _jîng chá_ from one window while Longshot and his macaque handled the other. Jet, however, was nowhere to be seen.

Zuko scanned the shop frantically until he espied its owner hiding under the surface of the counter, knees disquietly pressed up to his chest, with another patron -a mother- and her kid. The Freedom Fighter then swept across the room, full-tiltーdashing through the leeway between now disbanded items of furniture, and the second he was in range, clutched the man’s throat before slamming him against the adjacent wall.

Zuko ignored the shriek that emitted the woman beside them and bestowed the proprietor with an incensed glare. “Where is he?” the pirate beseeched, distantly taken aback by how calm he sounded. “You were watching everything from the back, so where is he?”

The man abraded his fingers across the hand tightly clasping his throat until Zuko loosened his grip, evoking a thin hiss of high-pitched breath from the former, at least too harsh to be a gasp. “He stormed off to the upper floor,” he elucidated, “just moments before the old man got killed.”

Zuko didn’t think there was another time he sprinted so capriciously fast in his life, respiration audibly quickening over the resound of the First Mate asking - _screaming_ , more like- anent where he was going. When he had burst open the hatch affixed to the loft above and screamed about the occurrences following his Captain’s departure, Jet didn’t even spare a glanceーhe was sitting on a stool pushed near its corresponding slat in the midst of the room and responded with an incongruous, almost casual “I’m having everyone leave some of their things behind once we get out of here.”

Zuko gawked at him in stupefaction, his brow pinched in under the black fillet around his forehead. “...What?” Jet removed the straw of wheat from his mouth and tucked it away somewhere, reclining a bit as he drank the rest of his tea and settled the cup down with a ‘clank.’ He -finally- turned to look at the other pirate.

“We’re heading back to the dock. Tonight.” Zuko exhaled sharply. “Captain, traveling to Shaanxi by boat is incredibly hazardous! Everyone knows that the climates of the Great Southern and Eastern oceans are terrible. That’s literally why you propo-“

“I _know_ ,” Jet retorted, “did you not listen to a word that man said? They don’t just have posters of only _you_ , now.“ He sighed and stood up from the chair, shaking his head with a frustrated mien. “I knew we should’ve killed the little squealer when we had the chance. Now every prefect in all of Qing Dynasty is going to search for us.”

Jet began approaching Zuko by a few steps. “We’re going to get ourselves amputated the longer we stay here. We have plenty of time to trek back to coast.” The Captain was about to circuit Zuko for the stairs behind him until the latter abruptly whipped out his _dao_ with the sweep of his arms, blocking the egress.

“No,” the pirate avouched; his built-up malaise and disgruntlement stripping him of any deference he bothered to spare. “You don’t get to do this whenever you want.”

Jet stared at himーface inscrutable with the exception of one brow being furrowed in what seemed to be either dubiety or admonishment. Suddenly, he slumped a hand upon his hip and tilted his head to the side.

“I thought you’d learn your lesson by now,” the Captain avered, his disbelief disguised as amusement was emphasized by the gesticulation of his hand. Zuko kept glaring at him.

“You can’t just keep me on the line forever. I’ve been accommodating all of you for far too long without apprising me and I’m sick of it.” Jet lowered his head and sighed, eyes shut under the furrow of his brows. “How many times do I have to drub you until you quit testing me?”

Suddenly the Captain vaulted his leg upwards in a kick to try and shove Zuko away until the latter blocked it with the blunt spine of one knife, followed by the swipe of its counterpart being halted by Jet’s vambrace with a ‘clink.’ He then took a step back to sling out his _shuang gou_ but the other pirate didn’t waste any time in beholding it; instead charging forwards and meeting each abrade of Jet’s melee weapons with the clash of his own, both of them unawarely steering one another towards the center of the loft.

At one point the Captain had assailed Zuko with one of his hooks in a feint across the lower half of his unmarred cheek, and the pair briefly paused their affray as he raised the tip of a blade to flick off a globule of blood from the neoteric wound.

“About _time_ ,” he snarled; his throat ached and the audible tremble of his voice nearly caught him off guard as much as Jet’s recent strike did. “Back in my country, when you hate someone, you don’t shanghai and delude them for as long as you want, you _brand them on the face_ and get it over with!”

Zuko halfway kneeled into an unexpected crouch and swept a _dao_ knife in a low circular attack that managed to trance Jet’s ankle from spine to buskin. The maneuver evoked him to stagger back to the slat behind him but was nonetheless too quick for that, springing backwards onto the wooden surface -knocking the teacup onto the floor- and darting out his right hook in an upcoming incursion. Zuko caught the curve of its tip with a lash of his _dao_ knife before it could strike him, however, and hauled Jet down with the wield of their affixed blades in his favor.

Before the Captain’s figure could leave the slat entirely Zuko abruptly swung at him with the other broadsword, spurning Jet any time to even flinch when the blood-stained tip of his knife fastened a piece of unarmored garb by the shoulder to the wall, blade mere inches away from Jet’s face.

Zuko’s eyes bore into his Captain’s affronted gaze with rancor so notably potent that it even shocked himself a little, his palm still affixed to the broadsword’s hilt near Jet while they huffed in enervation from their fight.

Out of the blue, Jet’s countenance actually seemed to _soften_ a little, his features emphasized by the raise of his hand to gently flick back some tresses overlapping Zuko’s forehead, completely riveting the latter in place with its unusual leniency. “I could never hate you,” he disclosed, the slight crease between his brows imparting an expression the crewmate couldn’t quite discern. A moment’s silence had followed and Zuko distantly noted that the sounds of permeating _jîng chá_ had now muffled from below instead of reverberating loudly through the upper floor.

The pirate inwardly scrambled for any plausible words to address the situation until Jet beat him to it, uttering “...And I don’t want you coming back to someone who does.”

“Wha-“ The Captain leaned forward and kissed him with such a firm yet reposeful manner that Zuko seriously wondered if one of the employees had spiked his drink, or perhaps the latter had been so drunk himself that he had entirely imagined the sequence of events leading up to this moment except for the part where he had actually sipped his Jasmine.

Jet’s lips were chapped and sticky, the taste of Biluochun slightly tangible from the corners of his mouth in which the straw of wheat had altered back and forth. He briefly detached himself with an audible ‘smack’ before turning his head to the other side and proceeding to kiss Zuko, albeit the latter was much too dazed to reciprocate. Jet’s philtrum was rather copper-salty and the other pirate winced at the thought of him tasting like that anywhere else. His breath was gamy and somewhat putrid yet Zuko supposed that wasn’t particularly anomalous.

It was perfect.

“Captain, the shop is a front! The owner ha-“ Smellerbee and The Duke stood wide-eyed from across the room, not even a couple steps into the loft before Jet abruptly kneed Zuko’s abdomen, _hard_ , and the latter fell backwards onto the floor, groaning at his side.

“Anyway... we discovered barrels full of blasting jelly in a cubicle from the back of the kitchen. Our only way of escaping is through the roof, and if we toss the barrels over it then no constables will follow us out of Guangzhou!” Jet furrowed his brows in contemplation and looked to the side. “We could climb the mansard through the window here, but we need to leave some of our stuff behind to do so. Were the others able to hold them off?” he asked, jerking and tossing Zuko’s restraining _dao_ knife away from him.

Smellerbee nodded. “They’re rolling the barrels up the stairs right now. But we gotta get out of here before the _jîng chá_ break in through the floorboards we held ‘em back with.”

Zuko’s mismatched eyes widened with avouchment and he briskly rose to his feet, hands clenched into fists by his sides. “What about the locals downstairs? How dare you choose to leave them behind? They could die!” The First Mate stared at him for a moment before emitting a little sigh. “They’ll be fine. The margin of the roof is a few feet from the building itself so the jelly would burst outside of the shop.”

Jet nodded, descrying Sneers and Longshot entering the loft with a massive hogshead in arms through the doorway. He deftly snatched both halves of his _shuang gou_ that had descended onto the floor during the brawl that had just occupied it, pivoting the blades in brief ostentation before confirming the plan. “Let’s go.”

Ascending the mansard and undertaking further directions of their egress was -foreseeably- difficult regarding the sudden change of climate. Not that the ineluctable awkwardness that had followed the past few minutes were any less irksomeーSmellerbee and The Duke would occasionally glance over their shoulders to espy Zuko before quickly turning back to titter or smile knowingly, but the latter understood that they held no jeering intent.

Yet because the rain had abruptly resounded its inevitability once they were about to stoop down the edifice, the blaring detonations of the barrels down below had offset its victims’ screams; leaving most of the Freedom Fighters to quickly gain indifference of the overture as they curveted from various awnings to a sealed dumpster for their escape. _Most_.

Zuko felt as though his heart had dropped to his stomach when he landed with a crouch, the splash of a rather deep puddle emphasizing his alight. Another screech morphed into a wet squall appending the eruption from the shop behind he and his crewmatesーit certainly wasn’t emitted by Highfleet.

The pirate absentmindedly halted his sprint and raised a hand to prod against his forehead; perhaps to mollify his lightheadedness? Even he didn’t know. A second churn whisked his belly. He was listening to people get blown to death.

Zuko felt himself hunch forward before halfway spindling to his side, the ambience bestowed to him whirling faster than the maneuvers of his own body. He extended another palm towards his face to clutch the piece of garb wrapped just above his eyes and tugged it off, its fabric drenched with the raw, saccharine water eluding the sky. He probably heard distant reiterations of his name from across spacious pavement of endless cobblestones but most of his senses have seemed to coalesce themselves into only sight, granting him the privilege of beholding someone he had thought he lost for good not too long ago when he turned around.

_“Prince Zuko.”_


	7. Chapter 7

_The sudden pronouncement seemed to have completely riveted the corsair in place and pierced through all vertigo of his consciousness as if its words were a_ qiang _, evoking him to do nothing but return Lu Ten’s cordial expression with a disconcerted, gaping one. “L-Lu?” The veneer of his late cousin included an army uniform correlative to that of their dynasty as well as pitch-black hair slicked back into a topknot._

_Instantaneously, Zuko’s cousin then clutched his upper arms and pulled him into a sheathlike, wholehearted embrace to which the Freedom Fighter beatifically exchanged in reacquaintance; nuzzling his face against the crook of Lu Ten’s neck as he balanced himself on the tips of his toes to accommodate his height._

_After a brief moment they finally detached themselves from one another, hands still placed upon their inner elbows as Lu Ten proceeded to regard his cousin with a sentimentally cordial expression. The soldier’s gaze never averted from the direction of Zuko’s own when he began to slide his palms up the latter’s arms, grazing his chest and shoulders with such a cautious sense of amativeness that it evoked Zuko’s smile to nether into a lour while his brow pinched in on itself bemusedly._

_Lu Ten’s hands then lowered to congruent hips and rested themselves thereーa left thumb pressing against the pirate’s hip in a little spiral motion of amorosity and not at all how one would affectionately greet their long-sequestered kin. Zuko turned his head to espy the ill-suited gesture before sharply directing his sight back to his cousin, exuding a shrill gasp when realizing that the veneer from the latter was replaced with that of_ Jet’s _._

_Zuko staggered back until the blunt of his heel abutted that of an aberrant cobblestone and he fell. The shingle pavement of the street he was currently reposing upon abruptly morphed into that of a vehement body of souse; the shock of hitting its icy surface being so powerful and sudden that it knocked all the breath from his lungs in a profound yet inaudible scream._

-

The pirate awoke with the jolt of both arms behind him, underpropping the weight of his frame as ragged breaths of exertion became the only sound occupying the room he found himself in.

...Where was he, exactly? Zuko scanned his circumjacents after rubbing out the grot of his right eye, beholding a tray of spersed medical supplies near his feet, a basin of water adjacent to his _dao_ scabbard on the floor, one unrolled bandage spool whose contents were splayed over the side of his hammock, and a stool pulled up alongside it from which Smellerbee sat upon; elbows on her knees and hands clasped out in front of her as she returned Zuko's nonplussed expression. He was back in the fo'c'sle of their ship.

“It’s noon,” the First Mate discernedーher voice was soft, almost reflective. “You’ve been asleep for a long time.” Zuko’s throat felt congested, the sudden throb of pain at his temple only appending to his revelation of the unknown source from what had caused it. When he tried to reminisce over the events prior to his abrupt syncope the image of a thin stalk of wheat bestowing itself through the curve of a familiar, lopsided grin had flashed his mind.

“It was a long day,” he finally managed to reply with, swallowing away the closure that had settled in his windpipe beforehand. Zuko kicked off the light pelt that was enveloping him moments earlier and rested his forearms over bent knees in a hunch. “What happened, while I was out?”

Smellerbee stared at him for a bit -features inscrutable- before emitting a quelled sigh with the small duck of her head. “We managed to get out of the city in time. Things got a little arduous from the rain, especially when it came to boarding the vessel but it would’ve been a lot harder if we didn’t leave some stuff behind. There wasn’t anyone at the harbor to pester us anymore though, so we didn’t have to worry about that, at least.” The corners of her mouth perked up slightly after the terminal word in a breath of faux amusement before her face drooped back into a state of consternation.

“Pipsqueak and I found you on the ground unconscious and he carried you pretty much the entire time we tried to escape,” she explained, behold targeting anywhere with the exception of the subject at hand. “Jet was _really_ nervous when he found out, you know.”

The disclosure elicited Zuko to perk his head up in sudden enthrallment, bestowing the other pirate with an enlargement of amber orbs. “I mean, it didn’t get in the way of anything, but when we finally set sail and had Longshot tend to your head injury he practically shoved everyone aside and insisted he stay here with us until you woke up. We found him asleep on the floor the next morning.”

Zuko’s throat was clenched in somewhat of a gobbet again, doing his best to not sound stridulent when concluding a moment of silence that was probably lingering for too long. “So, d-do you…?”

“Yes,” Smellerbee remarked, emphasizing her interjection with a smile. “I know. So does The Duke.” Zuko sighed -whether it was from relief or chagrin, even he didn’t know- and shifted his position to flump himself on the edge of his hammock, a few feet from where the First Mate sat. “It’s just-” he inhaled sharply, “I don’t _know_ if I feel the same way. And the truth is… I’m scared. I’m scared at the possibility that I might, because the stakes at risk are just too lofty. It’s not going to work, at least in the long term, you know?”

He was by no means proud of the little crackle of vulnerability audible through his ramble, nor the exasperation that followed just as quickly. Though Zuko wouldn't have admitted it to anyone else besides the woman before him, the thought of imminently walking away from Jet set up a rigid, heavy ache somewhere in the middle of his pneuma. Yet there was a bitter satisfaction in it too, and he enwrapped himself over that like the flesh of a fruit around its seed. Sooner or later their arrangement would be over, there was no question of that. He never should have gotten involved with such comminatory business from the start, despite all circumstances of the situation undoubtedly and incontestably working against his favor. Now, however, Zuko could wash his hands of it, and _that_ was the unfeigned relief. He could accept it, at least, and be proud.

He solemnly ran his fingers through the overlaying tresses of his hair and distantly realized that the fillet was absent from his head. Smellerbee seemed to have heeded the discernment and pulled out the ripped strip of garb from her belt, handing it out to him before the latter secured it beneath his palling hair, muttering his gratitude.

“Jet knows his priorities,” the First Mate broached, the gentle intonation of her voice piercing through the quiet as starkly as it ever did. “He’s our Captain and understands the weight of each decision he makes for the sake of the crew, and from the looks of it, you do so as well. Going through with the disposition doesn’t mean you can’t figure things out and make the journey all the more worthwhile for yourself, even if it was instigated out of your control.”

Zuko simply peered at her for a moment, brow furrowed in contemplation before exuding a weak laugh, upper body slumped over as his hands clutched the bourns of the hammock from either side on which he sat. “You always know what to say,” he remarked, evoking a warm smile to lift the edges of Smellerbee’s mouth.

The pirate hopped down from the kip and stretched his back with one arm hanging over the underside of its counterpart, briefly repeating the action with the switch of both limbs. “I’m going to go get some air,” he revealed, bestowing Smellerbee with a grin of his own before turning to exit the fo’c’sle.

From the moment he stepped out onto deck a palm had immediately jolted to the crest of his squinting vision, distantly heeding how the resplendence of sunlight contradicted the slight dimness of his lodging as well as the gloaming rainfall that was practically tormenting his crewmates the past evening. The flaky timber of the floorboards were slabbered with puddles that were in the midst of drying out from the blessed phosphorescence of daytime, and the topgallant sails affixed to open masts were no exception. As Zuko began to stroll in the direction of his Captain's quarters near the periphery of the ship he also noted the growing disquietude that had nearly hindered him from reaching the sterncastle entirely, more so than he’d be willing to admit.

Once reaching his destination, the corsair abutted Jet’s hatch with a few knocks before having been reciprocated with nothing but silence. “Captain? It’s me. I just wanted to let you know that I’m fi-” His mnemonic became short-lived when the door suddenly lurched open, a gelled hand reaching out to briskly pull Zuko in through the headroom’s entrance as the latter noted that the hatch was then slammed shut behind him not a moment afterーfeeling the crimp of two hands gripping his shoulders hard enough to be nearly mistaken for vise and the corsair didn’t need to be presently facing a rather visibly perturbed Jet to decipher _exactly_ who those palms belonged to.

“I’m so glad you’re OK,” the Captain divulged, almost breathlessly as he held Zuko against the compacted surface of the door to his back. The stalk of wheat was absent from his lips and the discernible sense of vulnerability and relief from his features caught the latter off guard from how atypical it was to perceive them on Jet’s face. The reaction was… not ill-fitting by any means, but rather endearing to behold from such a usually subjugating figure. Nothing seemed to hamper how good he looked, although it wasn’t like _that_ was anything new.

“Y-yeah. Me too,” Zuko managed to stifle out, attempting to ignore the surge of heat that alighted his unmarred cheek. Jet then practically hurled him into an abrupt yet fortuitous hug and the other pirate wasted no time in nuzzling his mien onto the crook of the former’s neck, multiple arms enwrapping one another as Zuko raised himself by the tips of his toes to reach the Captain’s face.

“We’re already halfway through the Taiwan Strait and I announced to everyone on deck that we’re heading for the coast of Jiangsu while you were still asleep,” Jet explicated. “The state of the ocean is going to get pretty hazardous in a couple of days, but we’re going to get you home. Not just for our benefit but also for yours. I _promise_.” His grip tightened slightly, causing respiration to be quite difficult for Zuko in an oddly pleasant way.

A nearly imperceptible yet sincere “Thank you” was all the latter could muster up for a reply, and was distantly grateful that it had been enough for Jet when he slowly detached himself from him. One hand remained curled around the side of Zuko’s abdomen though, and deliberately slid up his frame until its reverent fingers benignantly grazed his scar. He didn’t wince, nor repel it.

Jet’s palm then adjoined the marred side of his face with more firmness when Zuko began to lean into the contact with the droop of his eyelids, his own hand pressing onto the other’s as he intertwined their fingers upon his mien.

Neither said anything for a while afterwards, and they _couldn’t_. At least, not until Sneers started to practically bang on the door behind them in order to discuss the shortage of rope for the mizzenmast with Jet. Zuko and the subsequent crewmate walked past each other in taciturnity when exiting the room but not without exchanging simpers with the Captain behind him.


	8. A Disclaimer

**I will not be continuing the fic.** Due to a lackluster coalescence of reasons that may or may not be entailing my personal life (i.e many attempts to gain back admittance to the laptop I’m writing this with and my deteriorating mental health), ‘Hooks for Bones’ will remain unfinished. The story, I mean.

I know it’s likely not that big a deal for many of you who happen to be reading it out of quarantine-boredom and/or some prolonged yearning of new Jetko content, but for those who were genuinely engrossed with my depiction of the characters and various turns of the plot… sorry 🥶 I really am.

Losing all sense of interest I had in the story that pretty much enabled me to keep scouting this wonderful, fucking _excruciating_ AU built around our sword babies ultimately led me to write this: an apology uploaded so y’all won’t think I’m a writer with an incomplete multi-chapter fic without any sort of notice concerning such and therefore negligent of your horninessーwe’ve all been there.

Stay in school, don’t do oxycodone. Wrap it before you tap it. Happy New Year!


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